


Where Will We Be When the Summer's Gone?

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [10]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-08-10 02:43:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20128045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: Nightmares and dreams.





	Where Will We Be When the Summer's Gone?

Vinnie wasn't sure what woke him: Sonny sitting up in bed, muttering to himself, or that he'd taken all the blankets with him when he sat up. It was chilly in the bedroom; Sonny insisted on having a window open, for a little fresh air, and it wasn't cold enough for Vinnie to fight him over it.

But the blankets he'd fight for. They were **his** blankets, it was **his** bed.

"What're you doing awake?"

"Somebody at the door," Sonny said. "Didn't you hear the pounding?"

"Huh-uh." Vinnie listened, but he didn't hear anything.

"Somebody pounding on the door, with a bowling ball or something."

Sonny didn't seem to be making much sense, and Vinnie wondered if he was really awake. "D'you let 'em in?"

"No! What're you, crazy?"

"Well, there's nobody pounding now. Why don'tcha go back to sleep?"

"Don't open the door," Sonny said, settling himself on his side of Vinnie’s bed. "Don't open the door."

"Don't worry, I never to go bowling at two in the morning."

It happened twice more before morning stopped being a part of night. The second time Sonny didn't have the blankets, but he was talking to the hotel room door. Vinnie lay with his eyes closed, listening to Sonny.

"Come on through, man! Come on!" He wasn't yelling, his voice was quiet, but his tone was frantic. It took everything Vinnie had not to do anything to try to calm him down. "Come on through! I got some'a what you want!" There was no energy behind the words; it was as though he'd been fighting this same battle night after night and now kept fighting only because he had no choice, because he didn't know how to stop.

Vinnie kept listening. He could hear the pounding on the door now, too, Frank and a whole army of cops, the whole Bolivian army was out there, waiting to gun them down—

Vinnie opened his eyes, jerking himself out of the dream he'd been slipping into—some kind of hybrid between what had really happened at the Rialto and _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,_ which they'd gone to the day before.  


"The Bolivian army," he mumbled, and it might have been funny except that Sonny was just about to die. Again. 

"Hey." Vinnie put his hand on Sonny's arm, and Sonny slapped it away. "Hey," Vinnie said again, and put his hand more firmly on Sonny's arm. "C'm'on, it's just a dream, there's nobody at the door."

"Yeah."

Vinnie squeezed his arm. "Lay back down, go back to sleep."

Sonny was quiet, and after a little while he did lie down. Vinnie lay there, listening to him breathe. It wasn’t the first time Sonny had talked in his sleep, but it was the first time Vinnie had understood what he was talking about.

The third time Vinnie was already awake. He listened to Sonny arguing with the past, saying the same words Vinnie had heard in his own dreams more nights than he wanted to remember. This time Vinnie didn't interrupt, and eventually Sonny lay back down on his own, and it sounded to Vinnie—who had done the same on more than one occasion—as though he was crying.

You could bury the past so deep you couldn't even remember it, but it didn't matter. It never really went away.

If Sonny remembered anything in the morning, he gave no indication of it. But he did ask Vinnie if he wanted to go see _Butch_ again.

Vinnie had never told Sonny, but he'd never stopped dreaming about him. The only difference was, his dreams had changed.

Before when he'd dreamed about Sonny, they'd been guilt dreams, dreams where Sonny hated him, or was trying to hurt him. Those stopped when Sonny arrived. Probably that's when they stopped. Vinnie couldn't be sure because he’d thought Sonny-actually-there was part of his dreaming/hallucinating life. But at some point, he stopped having those dreams.

Instead he had dreams like everybody else, dreams that sometimes made sense and sometimes didn't, good dreams and bad ones. The difference was, Sonny tended to walk into them.

The first dream Vinnie could remember having like that was when they were in Kentucky. He'd dreamed he was flying an airplane, apparently his own airplane since he'd only gotten in it to get to the grocery for bread and peanut butter. It was a small plane, and he was alone in it, flying through clouds and a blue, blue sky, thinking about maybe getting a steak for dinner.

He landed the plane on top of the grocery and set the parking brake—something he was pretty sure (when he woke up) that airplanes didn't have—then he jumped off the roof of the grocery and walked inside.

He was standing at the meat counter, trying to choose a steak for dinner when Sonny walked over and told him he was out of beer. Vinnie thanked him, then found a steak he liked. He got the peanut butter, the beer, the bread, and three pounds of white grapes. He put the grapes on the scale, a huge pile of them, removing one grape at a time until there were exactly three pounds of them. He paid for none of this, just walked out of the store with his groceries. He wasn't sure how he got back up on the roof to get in his plane, but in a moment he was there, climbing in to fly home.

Vinnie's most recent dream was of playing some kind of board game with Frank and Uncle Mike and his second cousin Terri, whom he hadn't seen since the third grade when her family moved to Nebraska. Sometimes the game was Scrabble—Frank had a lot of those letter tiles, anyway—but sometimes it wasn't, and he and Uncle Mike both had stacks of colorful play money. Terri didn't seem to have anything but a chair to sit in, not even a piece to move around the board. 

Nobody seemed to be winning, nobody seemed to care, and the number of dice kept changing. At one point Frank told him he'd spelled alliteration wrong, and Vinnie argued that he hadn't spelled anything at all, he didn't have any letters. But Frank made him hand over all his blue money anyway.

Then Sonny walked into the room, took an apple from the fruit bowl on the table, and left. Nobody but Vinnie seemed to notice him. Let Freud analyze **that** one. At least it hadn't been a banana.

Sonny had become a walk-on in Vinnie's dreams. The dreams were never about him, but he was always in them. Vinnie wondered, if he told Sonny that, if he'd love or hate the idea that he was ever-present, but not the star of the show.

Vinnie decided not to tell him.


End file.
